Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  If we are to discuss the influences of Zionism on the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968—and particularly what led up to them—we must make a detailed analysis of “Kafkaism” and of the “alienation” connected with it. Those who propagate this fashionable ideology, which was deviously introduced to this country from the West, have always emphasized the Jewish and Judaic origins of Kafkaism.

  Today, Prague commercializes Kafka as kitsch, puts his image on graffiti, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and T-shirts in souvenir shops, and affixes his name to tourist cafés in the Old Town. Two monuments—a 12-foot-high bronze Franz Kafka Monument by Jaroslav Róna and a 36-foot-high head of Kafka with chrome-plated moving parts—offer photo ops for visitors.

  * In 1941, Brod wrote in German to Fischel Lachower, Polish-born editor at the Israeli publishing house Mossad Bialik (founded in 1935), with whom Brod was arguing about the translation and publication of his books: “Excuse me for writing in German. The Hebrew orthography is still causing me problems.”

  * The second edition of Diesseits und Jenseits bore an epigram from Kafka: “A man cannot live without a steady faith in something indestructible within him, though both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed from him.”

  * “I consider every would-be intellectual action . . . on the part of intellectuals vis-à-vis the masters of the earth to be wrong, a further damaging and degrading of the spirit. . . . It is not for us either to preach or to command or to beg, but to stand steadfast in the thick of hell.”

  † Unambo came out to mixed reviews. “Whoever would see the new Israel in the light of both the criticism and longing of the old, departing Europe,” Herbert Howarth wrote in his review in Commentary, “may see it best through this book.” The New York Times reviewer noted the novel’s “pleading of Israel’s cause” and heard in it “a heavy and steady propagandist note.”

  * According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, all of Brod’s works except The Redemption of Tycho Brahe (Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott) were burned in Nazi book burnings. “Although Max Brod’s work might well have been banned from German libraries on racial grounds,” the Czech-Jewish educator Max Lederer noted in 1944, “it exhibited in its pacifist tendencies another quality equally odious to the Nazi regime.”

  * Brod’s dramatic adaptation of The Castle, translated by James Clark and produced by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, premiered in London’s Vanbrugh Theatre in June 1963.

  † Brod’s memoir, A Contentious Life, came out in German in 1964, with the same publishing house that brought out the German translation of Exodus, the bestseller by Leon Uris. It would be published in Hebrew three years later, just before Brod’s death. (Chayei Meriva, trans. Yosef Selee, Ha-Sifriya Ha-Tzionit, 1967.) Born in Stopnica, Poland, the translator Selee emigrated to Palestine in 1933, and published a collection of essays under the title Max Brod: Iyyunim Bemishnato [Max Brod: Studies in his Thought], Am Ha-Sefer, 1971.

  * Berglass, fictionalized in Unambo, also contributed stories in the 1940s to Gazit, a magazine of arts and literature. At Brod’s funeral in December 1968, Berglass remorsefully confessed to Shin Shalom “how deep and pure her love for Max Brod had been all these years.”

  * Marion Reich, Ilse’s sister, meanwhile fled to Rome, where she was taken in by a community of Catholics, and converted to Catholicism. After the war, Marion returned to Prague and was jailed by the Communist regime. With the help of Max Brod, she was released, and spent the rest of her life, until her death in 1977, in the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Zion (Notre Dame de Sion) in Ein Karem, Jerusalem.

  * Esther Hoffe neglected to mention this letter during her 1973 trial before Judge Shilo.

  * Brod himself distinguished the two sets of Kafka manuscripts. On July 1, 1957, he wrote to Salman Schocken:

  I wish to make clear that Kafka’s manuscripts belong to my heirs, with the exception of items given to me as a gift. Those of Kafka’s manuscripts that were granted to me, and thus constitute my private property, have always been marked apart; I removed them many years ago from the archive and this was brought to the attention of the heirs, who gave their full consent. . . . When the time comes to prepare a complete edition of Kafka’s works, I shall make sure that the manuscripts in my possession will be made available. The ownership rights to all other Kafka manuscripts belong to the heirs, as expressly stipulated in the December 6 contract between Mr. Gustav Schocken (of Schocken Publishing House Ltd.) and myself.

  * For more than two decades after Chaim Grade’s death in 1982, his widow Inna (née Hecker) turned away researchers who requested access to his voluminous papers, threatened translators with cease and desist letters, and refused to allow the printing of her husband’s works in Yiddish. After she died without immediate survivors in New York on May 2, 2010, the papers (including original manuscripts of Grade’s fiction as well as correspondence) were transferred from the decrepit apartment they shared in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on West 16th Street in Manhattan. In 2013, the Public Administrator of Bronx County awarded the YIVO Institute and the National Library of Israel rights to the estate. YIVO and the National Library agreed to digitize the archive and make it accessible online.

  * “The ugly word ‘Kafkaesque’ is an invention,” Max Brod writes in The Prague Circle, “but it is precisely this ‘Kafkaesque’ which Kafka detested and fought most violently. Kafkaesque is that which Kafka was not! He loved the natural, pure, good, and constructive, not the oddly-eerie, hopeless, not the strange that he always perceives and notes as a given in the world and incorporates with grim humor without making it anywhere his focus. This tender yet steel-like soul was not turned to destruction but to blossoming. Alas, he had no illusions about the difficulty of this blossoming and building-up. . . . Away with the repulsive expression Kafkaesque!” Among others who expressed a Brod-like distaste for the term Kafkaesque, Philip Roth protested in 1974 that Kafka’s name “is plastered indiscriminately on almost any baffling or unusually opaque event that is not easily translatable into the going simplifications.”

  † Adorno was especially wary of attempts to unlock Kafka’s writing with a Zionist key. In a letter to Walter Benjamin, he categorically denied that Kafka “can be regarded as a poet of the Judaic homeland.”

  Notes

  The Last Appeal

  “You spend your time at Kassit . . .” Quoted in Uri Dan, Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 22.

  “Fanatical Veneration”

  “Music is for me like the ocean . . .” Quoted in Leon Botstein, “The Cultural Politics of Language and Music: Max Brod and Leoš Janáček,” in Janáček and his World, ed. Michael Beckerman, Princeton University Press, 2003.

  “Men seeking salvation . . .” Letter to Milena Jesenská, June 20, 1920.

  “Composing his love poems in bed . . .” Referring to the Viennese writer whose short-lived journal Hyperion was the first to publish work by a young Franz Kafka, Austrian satirist Karl Kraus dismissed Brod as Franz Blei’s “erotic appendix.” See Paul Raabe, “Franz Kafka und Franz Blei,” in F. Kafka: Ein Symposium. Datierung, Funde, Materialien, Verlag Wagenbach, 1965, pp. 7–20.

  “For every ten Germans . . .” Emil Faktor (1876–1942) reviewed Brod’s first novel, Nornepygge Castle, in the daily paper Bohemia (December 23, 1908).

  “The ninety-nine-page volume, called Meditation . . .” Kafka’s first volume was not fated to sell well. “Eleven books were sold at André’s store,” Kafka wrote. “I bought ten of them myself. I would love to know who has the eleventh.” For an English translation of the book, see Contemplation, trans. Kevin Blahut, Twisted Spoon Press, 1996.

  “Just because the friendship he feels for me . . .” Letter to Felice Bauer, February 14–15, 1913. Quoted in Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, p. 342.

  The First Trial

  “The National Library was eager to add the Kafka collectio
n to a long list of the papers of German-Jewish writers . . .” These include the papers of Kafka’s friends Hugo Bergmann, Felix Weltsch, Friedrich Thieberger, and Oskar Baum, but also those of Martin Buber, Anna Maria Jokl (1911–2001), Ludwig Strauss (1892–1953), Gershom Scholem, and Else Lasker-Schüler. Of German-Jewish writers who (like Kafka) never lived in Israel, the National Library also holds the archives of Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), the founder of academic Judaic Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums), whose papers were brought here from Berlin in 1939 (though it remained unopened until the late 1950s); Stefan Zweig (who wrote in December 1933 to Hugo Bergmann to offer parts of his correspondence—with Einstein, Freud, Herzl, Valéry, Rathenau, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann, among others—to the National Library on condition that it would remain sealed until ten years after his death); and Austrian-born German Expressionist poet Albert Ehrenstein (1886–1950), who died penniless in New York. (In December 2011, Sotheby’s New York sold a letter from Kafka to Ehrenstein [ca. 1920], in which Kafka complains about his writer’s block: “When worries have penetrated to a certain layer of inner existence, writing and complaining obviously cease.” The single-page letter was sold for $74,500.) The National Library has a small archive (more than twenty letters) of the blind poet Oskar Baum (1883–1941), a friend of both Brod and Kafka. The letters may have been brought to Jerusalem by Baum’s son. For more on the Prague Circle, see Margarita Pazi, Fünf Autoren des Prager Kreises (Peter Lang, 1978).

  “Marbach would certainly be the proper place . . .” Reiner Stach, “Kafkas letztes Geheimnis,” Tagesspiel, January 26, 2010.

  “Only in 2007 did the library establish . . .” See Rachel Misrati, “48 Years of Personal Archives: A Historical User Study in the Jewish National and University Library’s Archives Department,” M.A. thesis, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 2009. Mordechai Nadav’s own estate was auctioned off in January 2013 by Winner’s Auctions and Exhibitions in Jerusalem.

  “As a native of Prague . . .” Ofer Aderet, “Professors Call for Max Brod’s Archive, Including Unpublished Kafka Manuscripts, to Stay in Israel,” Haaretz, February 8, 2010.

  “We the undersigned . . .” Other signatories included Professors Mark Gelber, Yehuda Bauer, Dimitry Shumsky, Zohar Maor, Sergio DellaPergola, and David Bankier (head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem). The German version of the open letter can be found at www.hagalil.com/2010/02/brod-archiv/.

  “The struggle to keep the Brod archive in Israel . . .” Nurit Pagi, “Brod und Kafkas Nachlass—und unsere Zukunft in Israel,” Yakinton, 2011.

  Flirting with the Promised Land

  “He had been invited by the Bar Kochba Association . . .” Felix Weltsch, who had worked at the National University Library in Prague, had coauthored a philosophical book with Brod (Anschauung und Begriff, Perception and Concept, 1913), and had edited the Zionist newspaper Selbstwehr from 1919 to 1939. In March 1939, Weltsch, together with his wife and daughter, emigrated with Brod to Palestine, where he found work at the National Library in Jerusalem. He died in Jerusalem, age eighty, in 1964. See Weltsch’s Religion und Humor im Leben und Werk Franz Kafkas, Herbig, 1957; and Carsten Schmidt’s biography of Weltsch, Kafkas fast unbekannter Freund, Koenigshausen & Neumann, 2010.

  “moved from an almost exclusive and deliberate preoccupation . . .” Robert Weltsch, Max Brod and His Age, Leo Baeck Institute, 1970. See also Maurice Friedman, “The Prague Bar Kochbans and the ‘Speeches on Judaism,’ ” in Martin Buber’s Life and Work: The Early Years, 1878–1923, Dutton 1981.

  “The Three Phases of Zionism.” Brod’s 1917 essay put Ahad Ha’am’s recently republished 1895 essay, “At the Crossroads,” in conversation with Martin Buber’s The Jewish Movement (Die jüdische Bewegung), a collection of Zionist speeches and essays published in 1916.

  “A 78-minute silent documentary film, produced by Noah Sokolovsky . . .” On the reception and restoration of the film, see “For Czarist Russia’s Jews, a Look at a Promised Land,” J. Hoberman, New York Times, February 27, 2000. Eight years later, in 1921, Kafka attended a screening of the silent film Shivat Zion (A Return to Zion), which similarly depicted the pioneers and Zionist leaders in Palestine.

  “What had they done . . .” Quoted in Wilma Iggers (ed.), Die Juden in Böhmen und Mähren. Ein historisches Lesebuch, C.H. Beck Verlag, 1986, p. 225.

  “He read reports in Prague’s Zionist weekly Selbstwehr about the Beilis blood libel in Kiev . . .” See Arnold J. Band, “Kafka and the Beilis Affair,” Comparative Literature, Spring 1980.

  “Hans Blüher’s Secessio Judaica . . .” Hans Blüher, Secessio Judaica: Philosophische Grundlegung der historischen Situation des Judentums und der antisemitischen Bewegung (Berlin: Der Weiße Ritter, 1922). Blüher, a leading intellectual of the Wandervogel, the German youth movement, rejected the idea of a German-Jewish symbiosis and argued that the Jews’ “corruptive patterns of thought” are antithetical to the “German essence.” For Kafka’s comments on the book, see his diary entries for June 16 and 30, 1922. Felix Weltsch, friend of Kafka and Brod, responded to Secessio Judaica in a letter to Hugo Bergmann. Since anti-Semitism is inflamed by the Jews’ disproportionate influence on German society, Weltsch says, segregation is desirable (Max Brod: Ein Gedenkbuch 1884–1968, ed. Hugo Gold [Tel Aviv: Olamenu, 1969], p. 102). See also the exchange between Blüher and Hans-Joachim Schoeps, published in 1933 as Streit um Israel: Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch.

  “A popular textbook by Moses Rath . . .” Hebrew Grammar for Schools and Self-Instruction (Lehrbuch: Der Hebräischen Sprache für Schul und Selbstunterricht).

  “Yes. Kafka spoke Hebrew. . . .” Langer, “Something about Kafka” [Mashehu al Kafka], in the Tel Aviv journal Hegeh, Issue 256, February 23, 1941. Langer played a role in introducing Kafka to Hassidic life and leaders. In September 1915, Langer took Kafka and Brod to see the Grodeker Rebbe, and the following July Langer took Kafka to meet the Rebbe of Belz in Marienbad. According to Shaun J. Halper, who wrote a doctoral dissertation about Langer (University of California, Berkeley, 2013): “When Langer died his estate passed to Max Brod, who donated his small collection of books to the municipal library in Tel Aviv, which is today’s Beit Ariella (the library, however, has no record or further information about this donation).” Halper also notes that Brod helped to arrange the posthumous publication of Langer’s volume of poetry: Me’at Tzori [A Bit of Balm], Tel Aviv, 1943. See also Milan Tvrdík, “Franz Kafka und Jiří (Georg) Langer: Zur Problematik des Verhältnisses Kafkas zur tschechischen Kultur,” in Moderne in der deutschen und der tschechischen Literatur, ed. K. Schenk (Tübingen, 2000).

  “How could I think of such a thing . . .” Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, Gesammelte Werke, Taschenbuchausgabe in acht Banden, ed. Max Brod, S. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998, pp. 403–4. Paul Mendes-Flohr, former director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University, writes that “under Buber’s deft stewardship, Der Jude became not only the most sophisticated journal within the Jewish community, but one of the most engaging periodicals in the Weimar Republic.” (Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, Wayne State University Press, 1991, p. 211.)

  “Y. H. Brenner’s bleak last novel Breakdown and Bereavement . . .” Brenner’s novel was written in Palestine in 1913–14 and published in 1920, a year before the author was killed on the outskirts of Jaffa by Arab rioters. He was buried in a mass grave in Tel Aviv’s Trumpeldor cemetery, steps away from where Max Brod would be buried forty-seven years later. Hillel Halkin’s excellent English translation appeared as Breakdown and Bereavement, Cornell University Press, 1971 (republished in 2004 by Toby Press). “Without knowing that Kafka had ever read Hebrew,” Harvard professor Ruth Wisse reports, “the Hebrew critic Baruch Kurzweil called Breakdown and Bereavement the terrifying counterpart of Kafka’s The Trial.” (See Kurzweil’s introduction to the Hebrew reissue of the novel by Am Oved, 1972.
)

  “In her forthcoming novel, Forest Dark . . .” See my interview with Nicole Krauss in the 2018 edition of Paper Brigade, the Jewish Book Council’s annual literary magazine. Like Krauss, Philip Roth imagined that Kafka had survived both his tuberculosis and the Shoah. Roth brings the writer not to Palestine but to New Jersey, a “Jewish refugee arriving in America in 1938 . . . a frail and bookish fifty-five-year-old bachelor.” Finding employment as a Hebrew-school teacher, this Kafka instructs a nine-year-old Philip Roth and dates Philip’s Aunt Rhoda, with whom he converses in Yiddish about gardening (“ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” originally published in American Review, May 17, 1973). Harold Bloom called “Looking at Kafka” Roth’s “best and most revealing critical performance.” See also Peter Demetz, “Mit Franz Kafka in den Strassen von Newark,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 2002. Another recent fictional treatment is Kafka’s Cats (Kafka macskái in Hungarian), a novel by Hungarian writer Gábor T. Szántó, which chronicles a Budapest professor’s obsession with finding Kafka’s missing manuscripts. Two chapters of the novel, both translated by Ivan Sanders, appeared in Moment ( July/August 2016) and Tablet (March 2016).

  First and Second Judgments

  “Brod’s obsession with collecting everything . . .” In 2011, for example, Jerusalem art dealer Meir Urbach, son of eminent Hebrew University scholar E. E. Urbach, summoned Shedletzky to a hotel in Wiesbaden, in western Germany, to evaluate a trove of Brod ephemera—from school notebooks to shopping lists—that Esther Hoffe had apparently sold in 1982.